post #201: this is much more clear.

‘VULNERABILITY AS ARMOR’:
EMBODIED SPIRITUAL COMMITMENTS IN WALKER, LORDE, AND BAMBARA

“The world is ill. The question these novels raise is how we as a human community will work together to bring it to health.” --Ann Folwell Stanford[1]
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All you have to do is make a promise. –Erykah Badu

At the 2007 National Council for Research on Women conference, womanist scholar Layli Phillips proposed that the next era of feminist scholarship lies in spirituality, that the relative isolation of feminist academic intellectuals and a hostile political environment will be resolved by taking healing and spiritual advancement as guiding metaphor and practice.[2] Phillips’ diagnosis echoed a number of other recent proposals: Hershini Bhana Young’s Haunting Capital (2006), Judylyn Ryan’s Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature (2004), Ann Folwell Stanford’s Bodies in a Broken World (2003), Gay Wilentz’s Healing Narratives (2000), and the introduction of This Bridge Called My Home (a 2004 update of This Bridge Called My Back) explored healing, haunting, and spiritual forces as the source of women’s strength. Womanist critics bell hooks, M. Jacqui Alexander, AnaLouise Keating, and a host of others have also taken spirituality and love as the central themes of their most recent work.

Though these trailblazers are to be applauded for the difficult labor of writing healing into academic language, this scholarly trend is the delayed appearance of spiritual development as a significant presence in academic feminist venues and publications. A holistic spiritual point of view was central to the theoretical, literary, and activist works that now secure the feminist canon. This dissertation uses the language of academic criticism to remind scholars that, in the works of central figures Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Audre Lorde, spiritual healing was the “absolutely crucial” first step to “… set you up to practice a freedom that improves upon use” (Gordon 267-268). Exploring the experimental promises of writer-activists Bambara, Lorde, and Walker, I argue that poetry, fiction, and social movement history advocate for socially informed spiritual healing. Although the specific healing mechanism discussed in this work became the dominant metaphor for late-twentieth century American women’s empowerment, the entirety of the vision has not been addressed by a majority of traditionally engaged feminist critics. This vision, grounded in diverse intellectual traditions, has been de-fused, its electric capacity for change untapped, for the very reasons that its transformative power is required: the process has been categorized as a kind of “blind faith” that “limit[s] revolutionary activity to the project of self-discovery and personal transformation” (Fuss 101). Academic feminism’s dominant narratives—including the mainstream histories of 20th century feminist movements—have retained a false binary that drains healing of its intellectual and creative component, limiting both our ability to acknowledge diverse intellectual traditions and our capacity to build powerful communities.

At the same time that Lorde, Walker and Bambara’s work is grounded in the specific life experiences of African diaspora women from differing backgrounds, the works present a holistic humanist vision. Honoring the particular experiences of the heroines and authors can only contribute to a richer understanding of how to build effective networks and healthier worlds. Recent work on healing, haunting, and subjectivity suggests that the process that has been dubbed “blind faith” is instead both visionary and purposeful. Lorde, Walker, and Bambara always stressed intentionality, commitment, and community as absolutely central to what Fuss calls “the project of self-discovery and personal transformation” (101). I demonstrate the conscious and complex structure of this vision, pointing to its origin in African American women’s literary and spiritual traditions and its political impact in each writer’s texts and lives.
Whether this vision is persuasive to the reader or not, it has a unique position in feminist history and a desperate relevance for a popular culture obsessed with self-discovery and a women’s movement in need of dedicated community. I hope that this project can make some headway in transforming dominant narratives of late 20th century feminisms, thus providing greater resources for privileged feminists to practice this truth-telling in themselves and their areas, and greater access for working women, women of color, queer feminists, and other constituents who too often must ward off the infections of patriarchy as they attempt to heal and collaborate with allies.

[1] “Mechanisms of Disease: African-American Women Writers, Social Pathologies, and the Limits of Medicine.” NWSA Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 1994. 28-47.
[2] The Cutting Edge of Feminist Scholarship. Panel at the National Council for Research on Women Conference, May 31-June 4, 2007.